A Special Forces soldier taking cover as two Chinook Ch-47 helicopters come in for a landing with supplies in the village of Nili, the provincial capital of Day Kundi in central Afghanistan, in this Sept. 17 file photo.

Comments by President Obama and his advisers this week suggest that the administration is slowly coming to the conclusion that the Afghan government – and not the Taliban – is perhaps the most serious impediment to progress in Afghanistan.

The US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has essentially told Mr. Obama that the US must repeat an Iraq-style surge in Afghanistan – adding 40,000 troops to the 21,000 Obama has already sent – to succeed.

Yet the administration isn’t even debating this request yet. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday that he will leave McChystal’s troop request behind when he attends a series of White House meetings beginning this week about the way forward in Afghanistan.

After the surge in Iraq, McChrystal, Obama, and the administration can be reasonably confident that the US military has the intelligence and adaptability to fight a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

The concern is that the Afghan government has become so rotted with corruption that it cannot consolidate the gains the US military makes. In other words, the US will never be able to leave Afghanistan unless there's at least a minimally effective government to help in the near term and then take over in the future.

Doubt over that point, more than anything else, appears to be driving Obama’s review.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary Gates said Obama always intended to “reassess where were are” after the Afghan presidential election. But allegations of widespread fraud have turned that reassessment into a full-blown crossroads moment.

“Once the election is finished, we are going to impress upon the new government what is expected of them,” she said.

McChrystal's plan

Though it has garnered relatively little attention, McCrystal made fighting corruption a top priority of his assessment. He broke down his new Afghan strategy into four points. No. 2 was “prioritize responsive and accountable governance” – above any operational changes (No. 3), or resources (No. 4), and below only the building up of Afghan security forces.

In his assessment, he writes of Afghanistan’s most powerful political figures: “Some of these major power brokers hold positions in the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces], particularly the ANP [Afghan National Police], and have been major agents of corruption and illicit [opium] trafficking.”

In a statement demonstrating the depth of the problem, he continues: “There are no clear lines separating insurgent groups, criminal networks (including the narcotics networks), and corrupt [government] officials.”

To McChrystal, his strategy includes an anticorruption element. He wants to use the 40,000 additional troops to protect Afghans from all threats – including their own government. NATO “can no longer ignore or tacitly accept abuse of power, corruption, or marginalization,” he writes.

In coming weeks, it seems, Obama will be deciding whether McChrystal is the man to bring the Afghan government back from the brink or if Kabul is now too rotten to be trusted.